I recently came across this awareness campaign about the congenital disease Epidermolysis Bullosa (EB) that blew me away. By making small changes to glossy photos of everyday objects, the advertising agency Lowe GGK really makes you feel the harsh reality for people with this disease. I think the images with the slide and the swing are the most disturbing.

Letters of Note has published a remarkable letter from Hawaiian missionary Lucy Goodale Thurston to her daughter, describing Mrs. Thurston’s mastectomy in 1855. The operation was done without any form of anesthesia. The doctors had advised her to not use chloroform “because of my having had the paralysis” (probably polio).

Dr. Ford looked me full in the face, and with great firmness asked: “Have you made up your mind to have it cut out?” “Yes, sir.” “Are you ready now?” “Yes, sir; but let me know when you begin, that I may be able to bear it. Have you your knife in that hand now?” He opened his hand that I might see it, saying, “I am going to begin now.”

Another day, another interesting find in the storage room rubble. The brochure “LEICA – Fotografie in der Medizin” (Photography in Medicine) was published by Leitz in 1961 (I think). « Read the rest of this entry »

We are looking for fascinating medical photography that… imagines medicine. Nothing is off the table: portraits, group shots, happy shots, tragic shots, clinical shots, photoshop illustrations, macro, micro, and anything in between. Can you imagine medicine, showcase it as art, and make us wonder?

To participate, simply upload your photographs to Flickr and tag them with “imaginemedicine” and “medgadget”, by 11:59pm ET on December 5, 2010.

In May Medgadget announced a competition called My Medical Museum, that encouraged people to visit their local medical museum and post a presentation on the competition website. The winner was announced yesterday: Adam Simone presenting the Warren Anatomical Museum in Boston. A great presentation combining text, photos and graphics to give you a virtual stroll around the museum.

With only 6 entries, however, the potential of this competition has not been fully realized. In my opinion the submission time was too short (about a month) and the competition website is very counter-intuitive and hard to navigate. There’s no easy way to locate the entries or find the winner.

The idea is too good to end with this, so I suggest to the good people at Medgadget to convert the competition into an ongoing project and make the site more user-friendly. There should be plenty of people interested in submitting, even without a prize.

Welcome to Grand Rounds Vol.6 No. 30 here at the Sterile Eye (photo credit). The theme for this edition is Visual Communication. Some of the posts address this more directly than others, so to harmonize form and content I have chosen to represent the submitted posts not by words, but by 450×150 pixels each.

None of the images are taken from the posts, but are chosen by me because they in some way or other embody the subject of the different posts. Click on the images to read the posts. Enjoy! « Read the rest of this entry »